This is a debut novel by a young Irish woman currently
living in New York. One suspects it is highly autobiographical,
as the heroine Isolt drifts through Israel, Greece, Paris, Amsterdam,
London and New York in the course of the book, places in which the
blurb tells us Emer Martin has also lived and travelled. The book
is Isolt’s bildungsroman, and we follow her formative years
as she moves from nihilism to the dawning of a feminist consciousness.

The milieu of the novel is the seedy underworld
of squatting, begging, drug-dealing and drug-taking, and small-time
scams. All of the characters are firmly outside mainstream society,
living in literal and metaphorical exile, like the Israelites in
Babylon. (The title also refers to Sevres-Babylone, the spot in
Paris where many of them gather for breakfast each morning.) Indeed,
when Isolt is asked where she finds hope to go on living, she replies:
‘"I have no hope. I can only live on the streets. I might really
go mad if I was forced to rejoin the ranks of society."’

But Isolt is doubly alienated, firstly as a drop-out,
and secondly as a woman within that sub-culture. She is sickened
by her own absence of power. One of the most interesting things
about the book is that it presents the Beat experience from a female
perspective. The world of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg et al contained
no country for young women, nor does its present day equivalent,
if we are to trust this tale. Yet Isolt’s deliberate choosing of
life on the road is intimately bound up with her perceptions of
her gender-role: ‘It was only when she reached puberty, and discovered
what it was that the world wanted from her as a woman, that she
began to hate herself and the world.’ She becomes an outsider twice
over, the lowest of the low.

Most of the misogyny in the book is personified
in Christopher, Isolt’s American husband. He married her to be legal
in Europe, she married him to get a Green Card. But what began as
a mutually beneficial no-strings-attached arrangement progressively
becomes more serious and ends up in mutual loathing and recrimination.
The most harrowing episode in the book is when he keeps her hostage
for two weeks in their squat on the Old Kent Road, while beating,
raping and starving her. ‘"There’s no such thing as rape in
marriage,"’ he declares at one point.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is that
here we have a young Irish writer who is not overly concerned with
the navel-gazing search for a definition of Irish identity. Her
young people have already taken their place among the international
underclass. Isolt’s friend Oonagh, speaking as an exile, underlines
this point: ‘"Everyone I know over there is unemployed...Most
of my friends have emigrated anyway."’

But, at the same time, Breakfast in Babylon
is far from being a simplistic ideological tract. As Isolt reflects,
towards the end: ‘We have all been born with homeless souls.’